"The Poet's Eye In His Tipsy Hour" (1800)

Notebook entry 791 (August 1800) records a ‘tipsy’ (that is, likely opium-dosed) Coleridge admiring the view from his Keswick home. He writes retrospectively about the shifting beauties of the lake during the day, jotting down his entry at 11pm that night with one eye on the ‘conical Volcano of coal, half an inch high, ejaculating its inverted cone of smoke’ in his fireplace. It's windy outside. He makes a start on the first draft of a poem:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
Or rather he diverts his eyes/his soul emancipates his eyes
Of the accidents of size/
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

An hour later, having gone to investigate some tapping at his window, STC returns and writes a little more in his notebook:

Nick! Nick! This is very nice writing. Magnifying in line 2 might make us think of microscopes and such, but I'd suggest Coleridge has in mind the Latin root of our word: not just ‘make bigger’, but also make more magnificus (‘great, noble, distinguished, eminent, august’). Sublimifying, in a word. The lovely chocky k-alliteration in line 5's ‘unctuous cones of kindling Coal’ (unctuous is a really nicely-chosen word), overlapping with the mouth-circling oh-assonances of lines 5 and 6 (‘cones’, ‘coal’, smoke’, ‘bole’) work together to imply a finely sensuous evocation of the scene. These two sound-patterns, the ck and the oh (the clinking of hot coals, the expanding oh-shapes of the smoke) get picked up in the midnight PS, which moves from nick! nick! to poa(cher). Sublime indeed.

Decades later, Coleridge published an article in Blackwood's Magazine (January 1822) under the title ‘The Historic and Gests of Maxilian’. This is a curious piece of prose, not really like anything else Coleridge wrote: a lumbering exercise in rather donnish comedy. STC had written to the Blackwood's editor, William Blackwood, sending him the text of ‘Maxilian’ and promising more: ‘Within ten days you will receive a second packet consisting of 1. The ideal of a Magazine—2. the first article on the history and theory of Witchcraft &c. 3. The world without and the world within—a tale of Truth from Faery Land-Book I.—4. The Life of Hölty, with specimens of his poems, translated into English Verse.—’

‘Some traces of these projects remain among Coleridge's papers,’ H L Jackson notes ‘but they were evidently not submitted to Blackwood's ... “Maxilian” appeared in January and was hailed by the editor, under the familiar pseudonym of Christopher North, as “a fragment indeed, but such a fragment as we are sure nobody but Mr. Coleridge could have written!” Coleridge's friends were pleased with the piece, and Coleridge was encouraged: “Mr Gillman & Mr Green both liked the Maxilian much—& it will improve. But small interruptions in my state of Health are not small—”.’ [H. J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge's “Maxilian”’ Comparative Literature 33:1 (1981), 38-39]

The essay itself is most odd; its first half a drawn-out, facetious, heavy-handed satire of the modern age; its second a verbose adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story Der goldne Topf. But as part of the piece Coleridge retrieved and reworked his nascent 1800 poem, above. This is how the poem finally appears in print, in Blackwoods, 1822:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size—
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

Unreprinted in Coleridge's life, this version was eventually published by his grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his 1912 Coleridge's Poetical Works, under the title ‘Apologia pro vita sua’.

In the earlier version we need, obviously, to continue back the strike-through to eliminate ‘Or rather’ from line 3 and so preserve the tetrameter. It's how J C C Mays prints the poem in his standard Princeton Coleridge: Poetical Works:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
His soul emancipates his eyes
From the accidents of size.
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

This earlier metre seems to me preferable to the padded-out pentameter of the Blackwood's version: ‘lone yet’; ‘Give to his eyes’ in place of ‘hath a’; ‘black shapeless’; ‘upwreathing’; ‘trim’ ... these are all make-weights and add little. But the final line, in both versions, has excited Coleridge scholars. Michael Johnduff, in his review of Coleridge, Language, and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Palgrave, 2011), calls this little poem ‘the most sublime of Coleridge’s fragments’ and adds: ‘Phantoms of sublimity? What is that? Indeed, something so sublime that even phantoms, wispy traces of it are sublime; and yet how sublime could a mere phantom of sublimity be? If we try to see what the poet’s gifted ken can see, this experience that is supposed to be transcendent here comes not to carry us off into the beyond, but to make us fall back upon ourselves, doubt whether what we just felt was real, and begin asking whether what we have grasped was indeed an experience of the sublime.’

That's as may be, but it's worth pointing out that ‘phantoms of sublimity’ is actually Coleridge quoting, or if we wish to be less charitable, plagiarising, Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). The poet in that work is surveying a sublime landscape, just as Coleridge has been:

                                          Mark the sable woods
That shade sublime yon mountain's nodding brow;
With what religious awe the solemn scene
Commands your steps! ...
                                       Behold th' expanse
Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds
Flit o'er the heav'ns before the sprightly breeze:
Now their grey cincture skirts the doubtful sun;
Now streams of splendor, thro' their opening veil
Effulgent. [Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, 3:286-97]

This leads him into a meditation on sublimity as such:

If human thought could reach, or words unfold,
By what mysterious fabric of the mind,
The deep-felt joys and harmony of sound
Result from airy motion; and from shape
The lovely phantoms of sublime and fair. [3:457-61]

This is, I think, another example of what Harriet Devine Jump has called ‘Coleridge's Unacknowledged Debt to Akenside’ [the title of her article in Studies in Romanticism, 28:2 (1989), pp. 207-224]. Because Akenside is forgotten now we tend to overlook how much Coleridge drew from him: Coleridge wrote to John Thelwall in December 1796 ‘I have room enough in my brain to admire, aye & almost equally, the head and fancy of Akenside, and the heart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn Lordliness of Milton, & the divine Chit chat of Cowper’.

The opening of this short 1800 notebook poem, ‘the poet's eye’, is a Shakespearean tag; but it is one already associated with Akenside, whose fascinations both with vision and the imaginative augmentation of what the eye sees was the ground of his celebrity as a poet, back when his poetry was celebrated. Here, for instance, is a passage from Anna Letitia Barbauld's prefatory essay on The Pleasures of the Imagination, which Coleridge certainly knew:

Why, he asks, does the deep shade of a thick wood strike us with religious awe? Why does the lightsomeness and variety of a more airy landscape suggest to us the idea of gaiety and social mirth? Is there really any resemblance, or is it owing to early and frequent associations? He decides for the latter, and beautifully illustrates that great law on which the power of memory entirely depends. This leads him to consider the powers of Imagination as residing in the human mind, when, after being stored by means of memory, with ideas of all that is great and beautiful in nature, the child of fancy combines and varies them in a new creation of its own, from whence the origin of Music, Painting, Poetry, and all those arts which give rise to the secondary or reflex pleasures, referred to in the latter part of his definition. This is accompanied by a glowing and animated description of the process of composition, written evidently with the pleasure a person of genius must have felt, when reflecting with conscious triumph that he is exercising the powers he so well describes. He had probably likewise in his eye the well-known lines of Shakespear,

The Poet's eye in a fine phrenzy rolling.

[The Pleasures of the Imagination. By Mark Akenside, M.D. To Which is Prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: Printed for T. Cadell, Junior and W. Davies, in the Strand, by R. Noble, in the Old Bailey, 1794), 26-27]

(That last is quoted from Midsummer Night's Dream.) I'd hazard that Coleridge, warm by his fireside in 1800, might even have been reading Pleasures of the Imagination, and had his own poetic imagination jogged by Akenside's Phantoms of Sublime.

"Poems on Various Subjects": Coleridge's Errata Slip

Click to embiggen. Poems on Various Subjects was STC's first collection of poetry, published by his friend Cottle (Bristol, 1796) and including those of his early poems of which Coleridge was proudest (there are also four sonnets by Charles Lamb, marking his first appearance in print). I have to say, though, I'd not seen this errata slip before. James Cummins, a US rare book dealer, has it on his website and notes that it is very rare to find a first edition including it. You can buy said first edition, errata slip and all, for a trifling $6000 if you want it. For me, it's enough to enjoy this slightly pompous but inadvertently charming page on its own. It's like a poem in its own right. For Antic huge read antic small, indeed!

William Case Jr

Robert Southey edited two volumes of his Annual Anthology (1799, 1800). Here were first published of a good number of poems by Southey himself, and by Coleridge too (not to mention Charles Lamb, George Dyer, Joseph Cottle, Sir Humphry Davy and others), including some very famous pieces: Coleridge's ‘Lewti’ and ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ and Southey's ‘Battle of Blenheim’, as well as his ‘The Old Man's Comforts’, so famously parodied by Lewis Carroll as ‘You Are Old, Father William’. Southey planned a third annual, but in the event it didn't happen. Many of the poems in the Anthology are attributed to their authors either by direct name, or transparent pseudonym (several of Coleridge's are signed ‘Esteesi’ for instance). Others are not attributed, but scholars have tracked down authorship, using Southey and Coleridge's own annotated copies of the volumes, later collected editions of poets and so on.

Four of the Annual Anthology poems are signed ‘William Case Jr’, all in vol 2: ‘Gorthmund’, ‘Sonnet VIII’, ‘Sonnet IX: to a Friend on presenting him with a Volume of M.S.S. Poems’ (at the head of this post) and ‘A Winter Sketch’. Nobody knows anything about this geezer; not who he was, nor how he knew Southey or Coleridge (if he knew Southey: maybe he offered his submissions out of the blue). ‘Not otherwise identified,’ says Kenneth Curry, adding: ‘no books of Case are in the British Museum or Bodleian.’ [Kenneth Curry, ‘The Contributors to The Annual Anthology’ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 42:1 (1948), 61]. He's not a very good poet, I think; but I was curious about him, so I had a rummage around.

I didn't find much, but I found  a couple of things. So: Case published a fair few poems, as fugitives, in various places 1800-1806 (the latest that I found). Here's one from The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry (1802), another poetical annual:

Following up that footnote tells us that the friend was another young man and poet manqué called ‘W[illiam?] Evans’. Other poems intimate that Case came from Norfolk:

... the River Yare flowing, of course, through Norwich and into the North Sea.

Case published two volumes of verse. The first, The Minstrel Youth; a Lyrical Romance, with other Poems (Conder 1801), was reviewed in the Monthly Review for 1801:

A very promising specimen of the young author's poetical taste and talents: we suppose him to be young; and if he perseveres in paying his devoirs to the muses, he may probably obtain a considerable degree of their regard and encouragement. The pieces here submitted to the judgment of the public are various, moral, and not destitute of harmony and pathos. The poem, in three parts, intitled The Minstrel Youth, is the most considerable performance, and evinces the the writer's proficiency in the Romantic lore which so strongly marks the ages of chivalry, and many of the manly old English Ballads.

You can read the collection's title poem here if you like, and see for yourself. Case's second collection was Pictures of British Female Poesy (Crosby 1803), concerning which The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review said:

The author, whose name is Case, and an inhabitant of Lynn, in Norfolk, celebrates, in various poetical metres, the more distinguished females of the present day; Seward, Charlotte Smith, Barbauld, Radcliffe, Yearsley, Hannah More, West, &c. The performance deserves a specimen to be given of it; and we select the following spirited apostrophe to Helen Maria Williams.

“But when she thus essays a wreath to weave
Of flowers, as rich as fancy e'er could paint,
Some meet her eye, that, like the nightshade, leave
In beauty's brightest gloss a baleful taint.
Say, fair Enthusiast, from thy natal land,
What scepric system lur'd thy heart away,
When late amidst an innovating band,
At Peace high altar flow'd the gratulating lay?*
Why give to France supremacy of fame,
Is all the victory, all the glory hers?
No: Britain owns a yet superior claim,
Thy Britain dearer ties on thee prefers.
Helen! the Muse regrets, thy talents shine
In light, that but the moral sense depraves;
Freedom she loves, yet not, oh France! not thine,
Hers is her birthright, thine the liberty of slaves.”

[*Alluding to her Ode on the late Peace, written in France]

No fan of France then, Mr Case. Did he live in Lynn, or was he merely from Lynn? William Case was Mayor of Lynn in 1790, and again in 1798 (he died in 1809). Presumably William Case Jr was his son. Junior published no more volumes after 1803, and no more poems at all after 1806, so far as I can see. Why not?

Could this William Case be the same man as Lieutenant, later Captain William Case of the Royal Navy?

WILLIAM CASE entered the Navy, 15 Jan. 1790, as Fst.-cl. Vol., on board the HEBE 38, Capt. Alex. Hood, and, in March, 1792, was transferred to the JUNO 32, Capt. Sam. Hood, both stationed in the Channel. From May, 1793, to April, 1796, he again served in the HEBE, as Midshipman, under Capts. A. Hood, Paul Minchin, and Mat. Henry Scott, in the West Indies, where we find him, after a short attachment to the MAJESTIC 74, flag-ship of Sir John Laforey, promoted, 3 Oct. 1797, to a Lieutenancy in LA VICTORIEUSE 14, Capts. Edw. Stirling Dickson and Richardson. While in the latter vessel he cut out a Spanish schooner from under the fire of a privateer and two batteries at Port España, Trinidad—took part, 7 May, 1798, in a very creditable action with two French privateers, the smaller of whom, a sloop of 6 guns and 50 men, was captured, and the other, a schooner of 12 guns and 80 men, put to flight—and, in Dec. following, witnessed the surrender of two forts near the river Caribe, besides valiantly contributing, in joint command of a party of 70 seamen, to the capture and destruction, at Gurupano, of two others, defended by at least 300 men, and of the Couleurre, of 6 guns and 80 men.” Lieut. Case's next appointments were, 27 Aug. 1801, 20 April, 1804, and 21 Dec. 1805, to the BEAVER sloop, Capt. Christopher Basset Jones, MAGDALENE, Capt. Joseph Lamb Popham, and AGINCOURT 64, Capts. Thos. Briggs and Henry Hill, on the Home station; after which he served, from Jan. 1806 to June, 1812, under Sir Sam. Hood, on board the CENTAUR 74, HIBERNIA 110, TIGRE 74, OWEN GLENDOWER 36, and ILLUSTRIOUS 74, off the Western Islands, and in the Mediterranean, Baltic, and East Indies. During the period of his attachment to the CENTAUR, Mr. Case, as First Lieutenant, was meritoriously present, 25 Sept. 1806, at the capture, in company with the MARS and MONARCH 74's, of four heavy French frigates from Rochefort, on which occasion Sir S. Hood lost his arm. He also attended, in Aug. and Sept. 1807, the expedition to Copenhagen—beheld, in Dec. of the same year, the surrender of Madeira—ably assisted, in conjunction with the IMPLACABLE 74, at the taking, 26 Aug. 1808, in sight of the whole Russian fleet, near Rogerswick, of the 74-gun ship Sewolod, after a close and furious conflict, in which the CENTAUR lost 3 killed and 27 wounded, and the enemy 180 killed and wounded:—and, in Aug. 1809, was engaged, under Capt. Wm. Henry Webley, in the attack upon Walcheren. After holding for two months the appointment of Lieutenant-Governor of Madras Hospital, he was promoted, 7 Aug. 1812, to the command of the HECATE sloop; and, on 15 of the same month, he joined the SAMARANG, of 16 guns, of which he appears to have retained command, in New South W. until 24 March, 1814. He has since been on half-pay. His acceptance of the rank he now holds took place 14 May, 1846. Capt. Case, in the early part of his career, also assisted at the reduction of Ste. Lucie and Trinidad. He married, 15 Sept. 1829, a daughter of Henry Hallett, Esq., of Chidcock, Devon. [William R O'Bryan, A Naval Biographical Dictionary: Comprising the Life and Services of Every Living Officer in Her Majesty's Navy (1849), 178]

(I think the numbers after the HMS names are the number of guns each sloop carries). No mention of any youthful poetic ambitions there, but then you wouldn't expect such notice in a Naval Biographical Dictionary. The dates fit, otherwise. And if this is the man, he was very often stationed in the Channel or ‘on the Home station’ up to 1806 (convenient for submitting poems to British journals), whereupon his naval career took off and he was stationed all around the world, 1806-1812 on the CENTAUR in the Med, the Baltic, and East Indies; and after that all the way to New South Wales. This would have made it harder for him to publish his poems, and might have crowded-out his time for poetry altogether. Or perhaps he came to look on it as a youthful extravagance no longer consonant with his position. Case's friend Evans, who died in St Vincent in 1801 of ‘contagion’ could have been stationed there as a naval officer: it was one of the key naval battlegrounds of the Napoleonic Wars after all.

This is all speculative of course, and could be quite, quite wrong. Maybe Case was just a bourgeois-of-leisure in Lynn the whole time and Lieutenant Case quite another person. But there's certainly a quantity of sea-verse in Case's oeuvre. Here, for instance, are stanzas 2 and 3 from the ‘Descriptive Sketch’ whose opening I quoted above:

(The Garien is another name for the river Yare). ‘To thee, vast deep! this moral truth I owe’ the poem ends: ‘That as thy calm now smiles, thy storms now blow,/Each object, e’en most dear, so fluctuates here below.’ Sound like a sailor to you?

Kablakhan

A rather likeable typo this, I think.

It's from Friedrich Johann Jacobsen's Briefe an eine deutsche Edelfrau ueber die neuesten englischen Dichter (‘letters to a German noblewoman about the latest English poets’; 1820). Pages 220-223 of that book are an account of Coleridge’s Christabel:

Sie erinnern sich, das Lord Byron als Motto zu seinem unsterblichen “Fare thee well” folgende Stelle aus einem ungedruckten Gedichte von Coleridge anführt:

Alas they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth.

Das Gedicht ist als wild, seltsam und schön vor der Herausgabe empfohlen. Es ist erschienen unter dem Titel:

Christabel Kablakhan, a Vision. – The pains of Sleep by S. T. Coleridge. London, Murray 1816.

The Edinburgh Review von 1816 behauptet, das aus der Lake School so viel Tadelhaftes gekommen sey, das man hätte glauben sollen, es könne nicht weiter getrieben werden; aber in eben dem Augenblick komme Coleridge wie ein Riese, der durch Schlaf gestärkt sey (er hatte von 1808 bis 1816 kein Gedicht herausgegeben) und breche auf das Publicum mit diesen Worten herein:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock
And the owls have auaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!
And hark – again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, - - - - - - - -
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennet beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
E'er and aye, moonshine or shou'er;
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shrouds.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.

Die Fabel der wilden, abentheuerlichen Gedichte ist diese. Der Lady Christabel träumt von ihrem Geliebten. Sie geht in der Nacht auf's Feld, findet die Lady Geraldine unter einem Baum, woselbst sie von 5 unbekannten Entführern in Krämpfen gelassen ist. Sie wird von der Lady Christabel nach dem Schlosse gebracht. Hier erscheint ihr die verstorbene Mutter der Christabel, – es gehen wunderliche Dinge vor, der Vater der Christabel sendet die Geraldine im höchsten Zorn darüber zu ihrem Vater zurück.

Das zweite und dritte Gedicht sind noch unbedeutender als das erste.

Es heisst in Dr. Adrian's Uebersetzung der Gedichte von Lord Byron, Letzterer habe den Anfang des Gedichtes Christabel, welches damals noch nicht gedruckt gewesen sey, in der Schweiz recitirt. Einer aus der Gesellschaft sey von dem Grausenvollen dieser Geschichte so ergriffen geworden, das er mit Entsetzen aus dem Zimmer geeilt sey. Der Lord und ein Arzt wären ihm gefolgt, hätten ihn fast ohnmähtig und mit Angstschweiss bedeckt gefunden, und er habe behauptet, eine Erscheinung gehabt zu haben. Wie die Gesellschaft zuzückgekehrt, sey der Vorschlag gemacht worden, jeder der Anwesenden solle ein Gedicht niederschreiben, welches auf irgend eine übernatürliche Einwirkung gegründet wäre. Lord Byron habe bei dieser Gelegenheit seine Erzählung, the Vampyr, geschrieben, die auf dem arabischen, griechischen und ungarischen Aberglauben beruht, das es Blutsauger giebt, die das Blut von geliebten Personen so lange aussaugen, bis sie davon sterben. Ich sandte Ihnen den Vampyr, und da Sie die Erzählung der Talente des grossen Dichters unwürdig hielten, so will ich sie nicht weiter commentiren. Viele urtheilen aber günstiger über Coleridge als der Edinburger, und selbst dieser nennt einige der früheren Gedichte von Coleridge als sehr vorzüglich. Coleridge hat eine wahre Wasserscheu vor den Critikern. Er klagt, während Lord Byron und Walter Scott seine Christabel gut gefunden, verfolgten ihn die Critiker so unbarmherzig, das er ihre Gestalten sehe, wo er gehe und stehe. Coleridge's Bemerkungen über Shakspeare werden von Vielen gerühmt.

This means:

You'll remember that Lord Byron's motto for his immortal “Fare thee well” was the following passage from one of the unpublished poems of Coleridge:

Alas they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth.

The poem thuswise recommended is wild, strange and beautiful. It has now been published under the title:

Christabel Kablakhan, a Vision. – The Pains of Sleep by S. T. Coleridge. London, Murray 1816.

The Edinburgh Review of 1816 claimed that the Lake School was having such a damaging effect on poetry that it ought not to be permitted to continue. But at that very moment Coleridge came like a giant strengthened by sleep (for he had published no poetry between 1808 to 1816) to astonish the public with these words:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock
And the owls have auaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!
And hark – again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, - - - - - - - -
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennet beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
E'er and aye, moonshine or shou'er;
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shrouds.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.

Here is the story of this wild, adventurous poem: Lady Christabel dreams of her lover. She goes out into the countryside at night, finds Lady Geraldine under a tree, where she has been detained by five unknown kidnappers. Lady Christabel brings her into the castle. Here the deceased mother of Christabel appears to her—for there are indeed strange things going on in this poem. Christabel's father angrily orders Geraldine sent back to her own father. (The second and third sections of the poem are rather less effective than the first.)

It says in Dr. Adrian's translation of Lord Byron's poems that he recited the beginning of Christabel (unpublished at that time) in Switzerland. One of the company was so moved by the horror of the story that he rushed out of the room in fright. The lord, and his doctor, followed this indivdual and found him almost helpless, literally sweating with fear, claiming to have seen an apparition. As the group reassembled, the suggestion was made that everyone present should write a poem based on some supernatural influence. On this occasion, Lord Byron wrote his story, The Vampyre, based on the Arabic, Greek and Hungarian superstition that there exist bloodsuckers who drain the blood of loved ones, until they perish. I sent you a copy of The Vampyre, and since you considered the story unworthy of the talents of so great a poet I will not comment on it any further. Many, however, judge Coleridge more favorably than does the Edinburgh Review, and even that journal praises some of Coleridge's earlier poems. Coleridge complains that although Lord Byron and Walter Scott both rated his Christabel highly, the critics have pursued him so relentlessly that he sees their figures wherever he goes. Coleridge's remarks about Shakspeare are praised by many.

This is interesting on several fronts. Evidently, in 1820 in Germany Coleridge was so little known that it was possible to mangle the title of what is now one of his most famous poems (I assume the mistake in the quoted passage, Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!, is a simpler kind of typo). Also Jacobsen believes that The Vampyre was written not by its actual author, John Polidori, but by Byron himself. That book was, of course, result of the same celebrated competition that produced Shelley's Frankenstein: ‘Polidori developed the idea, and seems to have written it down for the Countess of Breuss, who lived nearby, and from whom the publisher acquired the manuscript. It was first published in April 1819 in Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, under the title The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron, later appearing as a book with Byron’s name on the title page of the first edition. His name was removed for the second edition. Byron disclaimed authorship, but the work’s immediate success rested largely on being attributed to him.’

According to the diary Polidori kept during 1816, Christabel was indeed among the books read during the famous ‘year without a summer’:

This point is the ‘ghost story contest’ proposed by Lord Byron in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati he rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he hosted, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (Mary Shelley by December) and Byron’s personal physician and occasional homosexual partner, Dr John Polidori, the keeper of a diary during that whole time. That challenge began, Polidori tells us, with an immersion in earlier Gothic: a group reading of Fantasmagoriana (1812), a French translation by Jean Baptiste Eyriés of German Gothic tales imitative of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and Byron’s recitation of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, just published in 1816, though mostly as its author had left it in 1800. From this confluence emerged a great deal of important writing: Byron’s own extensions of the Gothic in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems (December 1816) and his verse-drama Manfred (1817) – leading later to the ‘Norman Abbey’ cantos in Don Juan (left incomplete when he died at Missolonghi in 1824) – then Mary’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819), perhaps the two most influential of all Gothic fictions to this day. [Jerrold E. Hogle ‘Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Polidori and Mary Shelley’, in Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (eds) Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press 2016), 112]

Polidori also says that it was Shelley who was so terrified by this recitation. Indeed, Polidori tells us more: ‘according to Doctor Polidori’s anecdote, the “sight to dream of, not to tell” caused Shelley to hallucinate women with eyes for nipples and run screaming from the room where Byron was reading the poem aloud’ [Anne C. McCarthy, ‘Dumbstruck: Christabel, the Sublime, and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief’, Romantic Circles].

Jacobens' reference to the Edinburgh Review is to that journal's negative review of Coleridge's poem.

When Christabel was attacked in the Edinburgh in September, 1816—by Hazlitt, it has been commonly thought—Byron's name was linked with Coleridge's, and he was abused for his professed admiration of Christabel. “Et tu Jeffrey?” was Byron's comment upon this latest attack, for he believed Jeffrey to be the reviewer; and he wrote to Moore explaining his position in the matter. “I praised it,” he said, “firstly, because I thought well of it; secondly, because Coleridge was in great distress, and after doing what little I could do for him in essentials, I thought that the public avowal of my good opinion might help him further, at least with the booksellers. I am very sorry that Jeffrey has attacked him because, poor fellow, it will hurt him in mind and pocket. As for me, he's welcome.” To Murray he wrote, “I won't have anyone sneer at Christabel: it is a fine wild poem.” [Edwin M. Everett, ‘Lord Byron's Lakist Interlude’, Studies in Philology 55:1 (1958), 63-4]

Byron, of course, was vastly more famous in Germany (and elsewhere) than Coleridge, which is why Jacobsen tags his account of Christabel to the other poet. An interesting snapshot, though, of the effect a Gothic tale was reputed to be able to have on its audience.

I'm trying to track down where in the German edition of Byron's poems ‘Dr Adrian’ actually says this, but so far without success. It must be in the preface to Adrian's Byron: Erzählungen, in Versen und Prosa, mit einem Versuche über des Dichters Leben und Schriften (Frankfurt, Sauerländer 1819), but I can't locate a copy online. (The best I could do was an 1830 edition, Lord Byron's Sämmtliche Werke, Herausgegeben von Dr. Adrian, ordentlichem öffentlichem Professor der neueren Literatur an der Universität zu Gießen, but neither preface nor notes here make any reference to Coleridge.)

"Zahuris, Red of Eye ..."

This curious folk evidently appealed to Coleridge’s imagination:

The Zahuris red of eye & dwarf in stature, have the power of seeing in the earth as if it were water, & all treasures, bodies, mines springs, &c, appearing therein as substances in the bottom or middle of a transparent Fluid—see only on Tuesdays & Fridays, & are always born on Good Friday.— [Notebooks 2 (1804-1808), 3148]

Kathleen Coburn strikes a rare bum-note with her glossing of this entry: ‘The Zahuris have not been tracked down to their native country; possibly they spring full-blown out of the head of STC.’ They don’t, though. Their native country is Spain, and they spring from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique; published in 1697-1709. (The first English translation of this encyclopedia appeared in 1709, with a revised translation appearing in 1734-41; this latter is the edition Coleridge owned). And here is the entry that Coleridge read:

ZAHURIS, a name given to certain men in Spain whose eye-sight is so very piercing, as is pretended that they perceive, under ground, streams of water, veins of metals, as also treasures and carcasses. They have very red eyes. Martin del Rio relates, that when he was at Madrid in 1575, a little boy of this sort was seen there. It is remarkable, that, though this author is very ready to ascribe extraordinary effects to devils, he yet does not believe that the Zahuris discover water and metals under ground, by any magical compact; he imagining that they discover water by vapours, and mines by the herbs which grow in those places; with regard to treasures and dead carcasses, he pretends the devil directs these people to them, since they can declare what treasures and dead bodies they see, and are indued with this power only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
[A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical: a New and Accurate Translation of that of the Celebrated Mr Bayle, by the Reverend Mr John Peter Bernard, the Reverend Mr Thomas Birch and Mr John Lockman, vol 10 (1741), 249-50]

In a footnote, Bayle adds a little more information by quoting one ‘Gutierrius, a Spanish Physician’ to the effect that ‘the credulity of the common people’ supposes ‘that they are born on Good Friday, and that they owe this wonderful privilege to their birth day’, something Gutierrius himself scorns: vide quam futile ac irreligiosum commentum, see what vain and irreligious things some people believe!

There’s nothing here about dwarfs, which Coleridge seems to have imported into his note from his own head.

Many years later STC mentions the Zahuris again. July 1822 he was reading Johann Carl Passavant’s Untersuchungen uber den Lebensmagnetismus und das Hellsehen (Frankfurt am Main 1821), writing in his notebook ‘Dr Passavant has enlivened and renewed my interest in the Magia Thelematica, Thelematomagy, or Zoo-magnetism; but in other respects has left me as he found me’ [Notebooks 4 (1819-1826), 4908]. ‘Passavant's approach,’ says Coburn, ‘appealed to Coleridge because it was that of a medical man interviewing patients and citing cases, interested in the historical background of his subject and seeing in it a pious argument for the power of the spiritual. There were in his work links with magnetists familiar by name to Coleridge’. This quasi-mesmerist thesis, Coleridge thought, had certain explanatory advantages:

The supposition of the truth of Zoo-magnetism enables us rationally to account for a series of Phaenomena hitherto unexplained, or most unsatisfactorily explained away with Lies, Tricks, or the Devil, the Oracles of the ancients, Charms, Amulets, witchcraft, Prophecies, Divination, and extra ordinary Individuals, as the Female who misled Montanus & thro' him Tertullian, Behmen, Swedenborg, & (according to their own declarations, Philo Judaeus, and Porphyry) and of a lower kind, Bleton, Aymar, Pedegache, Campetti, the Zahuris of Spain, & (still living) the Swiss Female, Catharina Beutler.— [Notebooks 4:4908]

The specifics of Notebook entry 3134 can only have come from Bayle, but Coleridge later re-encountered the Zahuri through another text: Jean Paul Richter, whom Coleridge loved. Henry Crabb Robinson lent STC a number of Jean Paul books on 10th August 1812, including his sprawling 1800 novel Titan (notebook entries 4276-79 are all excerpts from this novel that STC has copied-out or summarised).

Early in this novel a strange hooded figure approaches the protagonist, Albano de Zesara:

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. “Remember death!” it said. “Thou art Albano de Zesara?” “Yes,” said Zesara, “who art thou?” “I am,” it said, “a father of death. It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so.”

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. … He asked, with indignation: “Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?” and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. “Thou dost not know me, my son,” said the father of death, calmly. “I am a Zahouri,* and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear.” [Jean Paul, Titan 1:45-46]

Jean Paul adds, as you can see, a footnote: ‘The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the earth.’ His message to Zesara is that his sister in Spain is about to die, and that before going to heaven her spirit will zip over to Northern Italy (where they are) with a message. How this fits with the ‘Zahouri’ ability to see through the earth isn’t made clear. But everything the trembling old man says comes true: the evening star sinks behind the mountains and his sister’s spirit appears to Zesara telling him: ‘Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,—I will help thee.’ Straight away a woman as beautiful as Aphrodite ‘with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate’ rises from the lake, revealing herself ‘down to her bosom’ before sinking again below the surface. Then the sister-spirit repeats ‘Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee’ and vanishes.

The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: “On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride.”

Fruity stuff!

It’s not clear to me how seriously STC took any of this (fairly seriously, is the implication of Notebook entry 4908). It's also not clear whether he was aware what the word ‘Zahuri’ or ‘Zahouri’ meant. I can’t find any evidence that he ever laid eyes on Stephen Weston’s Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages (London 1810)—too late for the first Notebook entry, of course—which implies that the whole thing was a sort of hoax played on foreigners.

So how does the dwarf creep into Coleridge's original notebook entry? We can make a pretty good guess: Coleridge's mind has moved from people on the surface seeing into the innards of the earth to beings living inside those innards, which is to say: Kobolds. Coleridge learnt about these creatures when he lived in Germany and the notebooks often make reference to them. They can ‘materialize in the form of an animal, fire, a human being, and a candle. The most common depictions of kobolds show them as humanlike figures the size of small children. Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly.’

Although Jean Paul's ‘Zahouri’ sppears as a trembling old man the original ‘Zahuri’ reported by Martin del Rio was a child. Coleridge has conflated this underground-y childishness with Kobold-ness. In doing so he creates a very different kind of creature, related to but different from kobolds (who were thought to live in the rock, as fish live in water and we in air). His Zahuris live in air but see through rock like water (and can perhaps swim in it, as we swim in water). It would make a fine addition to any Fantasy novel, or perhaps, though here I am growing fanciful, to the final howevermany sections of STC's unfinished Christabel. Maybe not altogether fanciful though: in his German translation of the Bible, Martin Luther renders the Hebrew lilith in Isaiah 34:14 as kobold.

An Oracular Pun

We know Coleridge was fond of puns. Here, for instance, is Notebooks 2 (1804-1808), entry 3073: εσται καὶ Σάμος Αμμος, ἐσεῖται Δῆλος αδηλος και Ρώμη ῥύμη means ‘Samos will become a desert, Delos will become unknown and Rome a single street’. The Latin, erit Samos arena, erit Delos obscurus, et Roma vicus means the same, but without the plays-on-words that makes the Greek notable: linking ‘Samos’ to ἄμμος (ammos, ‘sand’ or ‘sandy ground’), Delos to ᾰ̓́δηλος (adēlos, ‘invisible’) and Rome to ῥύμη (rhumē, a street or alley).

Where did Coleridge jot this from? We know he owned a copy of Bochart’s Geographia Sacra (3 vols 1681), although his actual copy has gotten itself lost. It'd be nice if it turned up in some auction, somewhere; I'm sure it has some cool STC marginalia. At any rate, it’s Bochart who records this curiosity [book 3 ch. 1 p.168], attributing it to the ‘Pseudosybillina’. Apologies for the grubbiness of the scan. If you click to embiggen it becomes slightly less grubby-looking. You can see that Coleridge has slightly altered Bochart's Latin: the original has erit et Samos arena, erit Delos ignota, et Roma vicus. Means the same thing, though.

Coleridge and Sanderson

Notebook entry 3032 there has never been traced to its source. Until now, that is: it's Coleridge summarising the following passage from a Robert Sanderson sermon:

It then remaineth to understand this text and chapter of that other and later kind of spiritual gifts; those graces of edification, (or gratiæ gratis date) whereby men are enabled in their several callings, according to the quality and measure of the graces they have received, to be profitable members of the public body, either in church or commonwealth. Under which appellation, (the very first natural powers and faculties of the soul only excepted, which flowing à principiis speciei, are in all men the same and like, I comprehend all other secondary endowments and abilities whatsoever of the reasonable soul, which are capable of the degrees of more and less, and of better and worse, together with all subsidiary helps any way conducing to the exercise of any of them; whether they be, First, supernatural graces, given by immediate and extraordinary infusion from God, such as were the gifts of tongues, and of miracles, and of healings, and of prophecy properly so called, and many other like, which were frequent in the infancy of the church, and when this epistle was written, according as the necessity of those primitive times considered, God saw it expedient for his church; or whether they be, Secondly, such as philosophers call natural dispositions, such as are promptness of wit, quickness of conceit, fastness of memory, clearness of understanding, soundness of judgment, readiness of speech, and other like, which flow immediately à principiis individui, from the individual condition, constitution, and temperature of particular persons. Thirdly, such as philosophers call intellectual habits; which is when those natural dispositions are so improved and perfected by education, art, industry, observation, or experience, that men become thereby skilful linguists, subtle disputers, copious orators, profound divines, powerful preachers, expert lawyers, physicians, historians, statesmen, commanders, artizans, or excellent in any science, profession, or faculty, whatsoever.) [Sanderson, ‘The Third Sermon: Ad Clerum’; delivered in Lincoln, 13th March 1620]

The text for this sermon was 1 Corinthians 12:7: ‘But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.’ This is interesting, because the relationship of the ‘species’ and the ‘individuum’ is important to the Biographia Literaria, and it suggests that Sanderson fed-into Coleridge's thinking for that book. (He does say, in ch. 10 of that book, that he has ‘followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition’, but that's the only time the theologian's name is mentioned). It interests me that STC jots down the first two of Sanderson's distinctions but not the third. There is something of a problematic, as the phrase goes, in Biographia with respect to Coleridean dyads and triads. So for instance, his ‘primary imagination’, ‘secondary imagination’ and ‘fancy’ distinction in ch 12 becomes, Sara Coleridge tells us, a dyad at some later point in his thought: he apparently annotated his copy to cross out the first and amalgamate the two kinds of imagination together.

Later in this same sermon, Sanderson says ‘prayer without study is presumption, and study without prayer atheism: the one bootless the other fruitless’, which seems to me a very Coleridgean sentiment. It might be worth excavating exactly what STC took from Sanderson, actually.